Benioff & Weiss talk about location and ages

Benioff and Weiss have posted again over at Westeros.org (where they go by “David and Dan”) in response to a few questions. They touch on accents, shooting location and ages of the younger characters.

Hello everyone:

We just wanted to respond to a few things you guys had brought up.

Accents: We’ll probably be shooting in the UK, so most of the cast will probably be UK natives. At the moment, we don’t have any hard and fast dogma regarding accents, though – except that, obviously, we can’t have anything that would seriously violate the tone, like Southern or Brooklyn (no offense to the South or Brooklyn).

Ages of younger characters: For practical reasons, we’re going to have to age some of the kids up a bit. A lot of it has to do with reasons you guys have mentioned; also, there are limits to the amount of time you can shoot with minors.

Where to send resumes for acting, or other skills: We’ve just started the process, but we’ll let you know as soon as the casting directors, production designers, etc. are in place.

Best,D&D

Winter Is Coming: Prior to today not much was known about where the series would film although it was speculated it would be either in Europe or New Zealand. Martin posted in his Not A Blog a few months ago, that Spain and the Czech Republic were two locations being looked at for filming. As far as I know, I had not heard of the UK specifically mentioned as a possibility until now. It makes sense though, what with the BBC’s involvement and all.

The age thing is no big surprise. The decision was really a no-brainer. It would have been very difficult to film some of the more risque scenes using young actors. Probably even more difficult would have been finding child actors good enough to pull off some of these roles. I would say this is the right decision. I expect Jon, Robb, Dany, etc. to be bumped up to late teens and Bran, Arya, etc. bumped up to early teens.